WikiLeaks Etc.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

"All men by nature desire to
know." Aristotle, when he wrote this, was saying that the thing
that makes human beings different from other creatures, the thing
that defines us, is the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. This is
not just to say that we human beings are curious creatures; it is to
say that our ability to think about and to act on the world around us
is bound up with our ability to know it. To be alive as a human being
is to know in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.

We all understand this in mundane ways.
We understand, for instance, that part of being a fully independent
adult, making choices about life, is learning about the world around
us and informing our choices with that learning.

In the Book of Proverbs it says, "By
wisdom a house is built and through understanding it is established;
through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful
treasures." But there is something more to all of this. The very
next saying in Proverbs is, "The wise are mightier than the
strong." This is the earliest occurrence known to me of the now
well-known idea: knowledge is power. To keep a person ignorant is to
place them in a cage.

So it follows that the powerful, if
they want to keep their power, will try to know as much about us as
they can and they will try to make sure that we know as little about
them as is possible. I see this inside everywhere: both in religious
writings, which promised emancipation from political repression, and
in the revolutionary works promising liberation from the repressive
dogmas of the church and the state.

The powerful throughout history have
understood this. The invention of the printing press was opposed by
the old powers of Europe because it spelled the end of their control
of knowledge and therefore the end of their tenure as power brokers.
The Protestant Reformation was not just a religious movement, but a
political struggle: the fight to liberate hoarded knowledge through
translation and dissemination. Through the confessional system, the
Catholic Church spied upon the lives of its congregants, while Latin
mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an
understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to
bishops and kings, not downward to serfs and slaves. The principle
remains the same in the present era. Documents disclosed by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden show that governments dare to
aspire—through their intelligence agencies—to a God-like
knowledge about each and every one of us. But at the same time they
hide their actions behind official secrecy. As our governments and
corporations know more and more about us, we know less and less about
them. The policy, as always, is to channel the decisive information
upwards, never downwards.

Today remember that it is good to seek
to empower the powerless through knowledge and to drag the
machinations of the powerful into the daylight. We must be
unapologetic about that most basic of humanities: the desire to know.

The powerful would do well to remember
the words of one of history's great activists as recorded in the Book
of Matthew: "There is nothing concealed that will not be
disclosed or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said
in the dark will be heard in the daylight and what you have whispered
in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed at last from rooftop
to rooftop."

Sarah Harrison: Thank you. Good
evening. My name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know. I'm a
journalist working for WikiLeaks. This year I was part, as Jacob just
said, of the WikiLeaks team that saved Snowden from a life in prison.
This act and my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not
return to my home, the United Kingdom, due to the ongoing terrorism
investigation there in relation to the movement of Edward Snowden
documents. The UK Government has chosen to define disclosing
classified documents with an intent to influence government behavior
as terrorism. I'm therefore currently remaining in Germany.

But it's not just myself personally
that has legal issues at WikiLeaks. For a fourth Christmas, our
editor Julian Assange continues to be detained without charge in the
UK. He's been granted formal political asylum by Ecuador due to the
threat from the United States. But in breach of international law,
the UK continues to refuse to allow him his legal right to take up
this asylum.

In November of this year, a US
Government official confirmed that the enormous grand jury
investigation, which commenced in 2010, into WikiLeaks, its staff,
and specifically Julian Assange, continues. This was then confirmed
by the spokesperson of the prosecutor's office in Virginia.

The Icelandic Parliament held an
inquiry earlier this year, where it found that the FBI had secretly
and unlawfully sent nine agents to Iceland to conduct an
investigation into WikiLeaks there. Further secret interrogations
took place in Denmark and Washington. The informant they were
speaking with has been charged with fraud and convicted on other
charges in Iceland.

In the Icelandic Supreme Court, we won
a substantial victory over the extralegal US financial blockade that
was erected against us in 2010 by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and other
US financial giants. Subsequently, MasterCard pulled out of the
blockade. We've since filed a $77 million legal case against VISA for
the damages. We filed a suit against VISA in Denmark as well. And in
response to questions about how PayPal's owner can start a free press
outlet whilst blocking another media organisation, he's announced
that the PayPal blockade of WikiLeaks has ended.

We filed criminal cases in Sweden and
Germany in relation to the unlawful intelligence activity against us
there, including at the CCC in 2009.

Together with the Center for
Constitutional Rights we filed a suit against the US military against
the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning's trial.

Yet through these attacks we've
continued our publishing work. In April of this year, we launched the
Public Library of US Diplomacy, the largest and most comprehensible
searchable database of US diplomatic cables in the world. This
coincided with our release of 1.7 million US cables from the
Kissinger period. We launched our third Spy Files, 239 documents from
92 global intelligence contractors exposing their technology,
methods, and contracts. We completed releasing the Global
Intelligence Files, over five million emails from US intelligence
firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included documenting their
spying on activists around the globe. We published the primary
negotiating positions for fourteen countries of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a new international legal regime that would control 40%
of the world's GDP.

As well as getting Snowden asylum, we
set up Mr Snowden's defence fund, part of a broader endeavor, the
Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund, which aims to protect
and fund sources in trouble. This will be an important fund for
future sources, especially when we look at the US crackdown on
whistleblowers like Snowden and alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea
Manning, who was sentenced this year to 35 years in prison, and
another alleged WikiLeaks source Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to
ten years in prison this November.

These men, Snowden, Manning, and
Hammond, are prime examples of a politicized youth who have grown up
with a free internet and want to keep it that way. It is this class
of people that we are here to discuss this evening, the powers they
and we all have, and can have, and the good that we can do with it.

I am joined here tonight for this
discussion by two men I admire hugely: WikiLeaks editor-in-chief
Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, both who have had a long history
in defending our right to knowledge, despite political and legal
pressure.

(Julian Assange appears via video
link)

So Julian, seeing as I haven't seen you
for quite awhile, what's been happening in this field this year,
what's your strategic view about it, this fight for freedom of
knowledge: are we winning or are we losing?

Julian Assange:
I have an 18-page speech on the strategic vision, but I think I've
got about five minutes, right?

Sarah Harrison: At
the most.

Julian Assange:
No, less? Okay. First off, it's very interesting to see the CCC has
grown by 30% over the last year. And we can see the CCC as a very
important type of institution which
does have analogues. The CCC is a paradox in that it has the vibrancy
of a young movement, but also now has been going nearly 30 years
since its founding in 1981 by Wau Holland...

Sarah Harrison:
Should we move over while we're waiting to you, Jake. As I was
saying, I think it's quite interesting, it does seem to be a trend
that there are these young technical people. We look at Manning,
Snowden, Hammond... often sysadmins. Why are they playing such an
important role in this fight for freedom of information?

Jacob Appelbaum:I think there are a couple
important points. The first important point is to understand that all
of us have agency, but some of us actually have literally more agency
than others in the sense that you have access to systems that give
you access to information that helps to found knowledge that you have
in your own head.

So
someone like Manning or someone like Snowden who has access to these
documents in the course of their work, they will simply have a better
understanding of what is actually happening. They have access to the
primary source documents as part of their job. This, I think,
fundamentally is a really critical, I would say a formative thing.

When
you start to read these original source documents you start to
understand the way that organisations actually think internally. I
mean, this is one of the things that Julian Assange has said quite a
lot, it's that when you read the internal documents of an
organisation, that's how they really think about a thing. This is
different than a press release. And people who have grown up on the
internet, and they're essentially natives on the internet, and that's
all of us, I think, for the most part. It's definitely me. That
essentially forms a way of thinking about organisations where the
official thing they say is not interesting. You know that there's an
agenda behind that and
you don't necessarily know what that true agenda is.

And
so people who grow up in this and see these documents, they realise
the agency that they have. They understand it, they see that power,
and they want to do something about it. In some cases, some
people do it in small starts and fits. So
there are lots of sources for lots of newspapers that are inside of
defense organisations or really, really large companies, and they
share this information. But in the case of Chelsea Manning, in the
case of Snowden, they went big. And I presume that this is because of
the scale of the wrongdoing that they say, in addition to the amount
of agency that was provided by their access and their understanding
of the actual information that they were able to have in their
possession.

Sarah Harrison:
And do you think that it's something to do with being technical; they
have a potential ability to find a way to do this safer than other
people, perhaps?

Jacob Appelbaum:
I mean, it's clearly the case that this helps. There's no question
that understanding how to use those computer systems and being able
to navigate them, that that is going to be a helpful skill.

But
I think what it really is is that these are people who grew up in an
era, and I myself am one of these people, where we grew up in an era
where we are overloaded by information but we still are able to
absorb a great deal of it. And we really are constantly going through
this.

And
if we look to the past, we see that it's not just technical people,
it's actually people who have an analytical mind. So, for example,
Daniel Ellsberg, who's famous for the 'Ellsberg Paradox'. He was of
course a very seriously embedded person in the US military—he was
in the RAND corporation, he worked with McNamara—and during the
Vietnam War he had access to
huge amounts of information. And it was the ability to analyse this
information and to understand... in this case how the US Government
during the Vietnam War was lying to the entire world. And it was the
magnitude of those lies combined with the ability to prove that they
were lies that I believe, combined with his analytical skill... It
was clear what the action might be, but it wasn't clear what the
outcome would be. And with Ellsberg, the outcome was a very positive
one. In fact it's the most positive outcome for any whistleblower so
far that I know of in the history of the United States and maybe even
in the world.

What
we see right now with Snowden and what we've now seen with Chelsea
Manning is unfortunately a very different outcome, at
least for Manning. So this is also a hugely important point which is
that Ellsberg did this in the context of resistance against the
Vietnam War. And when Ellsberg did this, there were huge support
networks, there were gigantic things that split across all political
spectrums of society. And so it is the analytical framework that we
find ourselves with still, but additionally with the internet. And so
every single person here that works as a sysadmin, could you raise
your hand?

Right.
You represent, and I'm sorry to steal Julian's thunder, but he was
using Skype and well... We all know Skype has interception and
man-in-the-middle problems, so I'm going to take advantage of that
fact. You see, it's not just the NSA.

Everyone
that raised their hand, you should raise your hand again. If you work
at a company where you think that they might be involved in something
that is a little bit scary, keep your hand up.

Right.
So here's the deal: everybody else in the room lacks the information
that you probably have access to. And if you were to make a moral
judgment, if you were to make an ethical consideration about these
things, it would be the case that as a political class you
would be able to inform all of the political classes in this room,
all of the other people in this room, in a way that only you have the
agency to do. And those that benefit from you never doing that are
the other people that have that. Those people are also members of
other classes as well.

And
so the question is, if you were to unite as a political class, and we
are to unite with you in that political class, we can see that
there's a contextual way to view this through a historical lens,
essentially. Which is to say when the industrialized workers of the
world decided that race and gender were not lines that we should
split on, but instead we should look at workers and owners, then we
started to see real change in the way that workers were treated and
in the way the world itself was organizing labor. And this was a
hugely important change during the industrial revolution. And we are
going through a very similar time now with regard to information
politics and with regard to the value of information in the
information age.

(Assange
video link comes back up)

Jacob Appelbaum:
Fantastic, Bruce Willis.

(Assange
video link goes out again)

Jesus
Christ, Julian, use Jitsi already.

Sarah Harrison:
And so, we've identified the potential people that you're talking
about and you've spoken about how it's good for the to unite. What
are the next steps? How do they come forth? How do they share this
information?

Jacob Appelbaum:
Well, let's consider a couple of things. First is that Bradley
Manning, now Chelsea Manning; Daniel Ellsberg, still Daniel Ellsberg;
Edward Snowden, living in exile in Russia unfortunately.

Sarah Harrison:
Still Edward Snowden.

Jacob Appelbaum:
Still Edward Snowden, hopefully. These are people who have taken
great actions where they did not even set out to sacrifice
themselves. But once when I met Daniel Ellsberg he said, 'Wouldn't
you go to prison for the rest of your life to end this war?' This is
something he asked to me, and he asked it quite seriously. And it's
very incredible to be able to ask a hypothetical question of someone
that wasn't a hypothetical question. What he was trying to say is
that right now you can make a choice in which you actually have a
huge impact, should you choose to take on that risk.

But
the point is not to set out to martyr yourself. The point is to set
out...

(Assange
video link comes back up)

Are
you going to stick around this time, Julian?

Julian Assange:
I don't know, I'm waiting for the quantum hand of fate.

Jacob Appelbaum:
The quantum hand that wants to strangle you?

Julian Assange:
Yeah.

Jacob Appelbaum:
Yeah. We were just discussing right now the previous context, that is
Daniel Ellsberg, the Edward Snowdens, the Chelsea Mannings, how
they have done an honorable, a good thing where they've shown a duty
to a greater humanity, a thing that is more important than loyalty,
for example, to a bureaucratic oath, but rather loyalty to universal
principles.

So
the next question is, how does that relate to the people that are
here in the audience? How is it the case that people who have access
to systems where they have said themselves they think the companies
they work for are sort of questionable or doing dangerous things in
the world? Where do we go from people who have done these things
previously to these people in the audience?

Julian Assange:
Well, I don't know how much ground you've covered, but I think it's
important that we recognize what we are and what we have become. And
that high tech workers are (inaudible)
a class. In fact, very often (inaudible)
a position to in fact prompt the leaders of society (inaudible)
cease operating (inaudible,
sound goes out completely)

(audience
laughs)

Sarah
Harrison:
Should we just leave him like that and continue?

Julian
Assange:
Am I back?

Sarah
Harrison:
Yeah. You've got three minutes to say something. Make it good.

Julian
Assange:
Those high tech workers, we are a particular class and it's time that
we recognized that we are a class and look back in history and
understood that the great gains in human rights and education and so
on that were gained through powerful industrial workers which formed
the backbone of the economy of the 20th
century, and that we have that same ability but even more so because
of the greater interconnection that exists now economically and
politically. Which is all underpinned by system administrators.

And
we should understand that system administrators are not just those
people who administer one UNIX system or another. They are the people
who administer systems. And the system that exists globally now is
created by the interconnection of many individual systems. And we are
all, or many of us, are part of administering that system and have
extraordinary power in a way that is really an order of magnitude
different to the power industrial workers had in the 20th
century. And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks that
WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations, it is
possible now for even single systems administrators to have a very
significant change, or rather apply very significant constructive
constraint to the behavior of these organizations. Not merely
wrecking or disabling them, not merely going out on strikes to change
policy, but rather shifting information from an information apartheid
system which we're developing from those with extraordinary power and
extraordinary information into the knowledge commons, where it can be
used not only as a disciplining force, but it can be used to
construct and understand the new world that we're entering into.

Now,
Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA, is terrified of this.
In
"Cypherpunks" we called for this directly last year. But to
give you an interesting quote from Hayden, possibly following up on
those words of mine and others, "We need to recruit from
Snowden's generation," says Hayden. "We need to recruit
from this group because they have the skills that we require. So the
challenge is how to recruit this talent while also protecting
ourselves from the small fraction of the population that has this
romantic attachment to absolute transparency at all costs." And
that's us, right? So, what we need to do is spread that message and
go into all those organisations. In fact, deal with them. I'm not
saying, 'Don't join the CIA'. No, go and join the CIA. Go in there.
Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out, with the
understanding, with the paranoia, that all those organizations will
be infiltrated by this generation, by an ideology that is spread
across the internet. And every young person is educated on the
internet. There will be no person that has not been exposed to this
ideology of transparency and understanding and wanting to keep the
internet which we were born into free.

This
is the last free generation. The coming together of the systems of
governments, the new information apartheid, across the world, linking
together in such that none of us will be able to escape it in just a
decade. Our
identities will be coupled to the information sharing such that none
of us will be able to escape it. We are all becoming part of the
state, whether we like it or not. So our only hope is to determine
what sort of state it is that we are going to become part of. And we
can do that by looking and being inspired by some of the actions that
produced human rights and free education and so on by people
recognizing that they were part of the state, recognizing their own
power and taking concrete and robust action to make sure they lived
in the sort of society they wanted to and not in a hell-hole
dystopia.

Sarah
Harrison:
Thank you. So
basically all those poor people Jake just made identify themselves,
you have the power to change more systems than the one you're working
on right now. And I think it's time to take some questions because we
don't have long left.

Julian
Assange:
While we wait for the first question, I'd like to say, it looks like
there's quite a lot of people there, but you should all know that due
to the various sorts of proximity measures that are now employed by
NSA, GCHQ, and Five Eyes Alliance, if
you've come there with a telephone, or if you've been even in Hamburg
with a telephone, you are all now coupled to us. You are coupled to
this event. You are coupled to this speech in an irrevocable way. And
that is now true for many people. So either we have to take command
of the position that we have, understand the position we have,
understand that we are the last free people, and the last people
essentially with an ability to act in this situation. Or we are the
group that will be crushed because of this association.

Question:
So you were talking about the sysadmins here. What about those people
who are not sysadmins? Not only joining CIA and those companies, what
else can we do?

Sarah
Harrison:
Jake, do you want to have a go at that one?

Jacob
Appelbaum:
Sure. This is a question of agency.

(Assange
video link goes out again)

Sarah Harrison:
Good timing.

Jacob
Appelbaum: It's
a question in which one has to ask very simply, what is it that you
feel like you can do? And many of the people in this audience I've
had this discussion with them. For example, Edward Snowden did not
save himself. I mean, he obviously had some ideas, but Sarah, for
example, not as a system administrator, but as someone who was
willing to risk her person. She helped, specifically for source
protection, she took actions to protect him. So there are plenty of
things that can be done.

To
give you some ideas, Edward Snowden, still sitting in Russia now,
there are things that can be done to help him even now. And there are
things to show, that if we can succeed in saving Edward Snowden's
life and to keep him free, that the next Edward Snowden will have
that to look forward to. And if we look also to what has happened to
Chelsea Manning, we see additionally that Snowden has clearly
learned, just as Thomas Drake and Bill Binney set an example for
every single person about what to do and what not to do.

It's
not just about systems administrators, it's about all of us actually
recognizing that positive contribution that each of us can make.

(Assange
video link comes back up)

Question:
Hi Julian, I'm wondering, do you believe that transparency alone is
enough to inject some form of conscience into evil organizations,
quote and quote "evil" organizations? And if not, what do
you believe the next step after transparency is?

Julian
Assange:
It's not about injecting conscience, it's about providing two things:
one, an effective deterrent to particular forms of behavior and two,
finding that information which allows us to construct an order in the
world around us, to educate ourselves in how the world works and
therefore be able to manage the world that we are a part of. The
restriction of information, the restriction of those bits of
information, colors it. It gives off an economic signal that
information is important when it's released, because otherwise why
would you spend so much work in restricting it? So the people that
know it best restrict it. We should take their measurements of that
information as a guide and use that to pull it out where it can
achieve some kind of reform.

That,
in itself, is not enough. It creates an intellectual commons which is
part of our mutual education. But we need to understand, say, if we
look at the Occupy event, a very interesting political event, where
revelations and perhaps destabilization led to a very large group
wanting to do something. However, there was no organizational
scaffold for these people to attach themselves to, no nucleus for
these people to crystallize onto. And it is that problem, which is an
endemic problem of the anarchist left, actually.

The
CCC. Why are we having this right now? Because the CCC is an
organized structure. It's a structure which has been able to grow to
accommodate the 30% of extra people that have occurred this year. To
shift and change and act like one of the better workers' universities
that are around. So we have to form unions and networks and create
programs and organizational structures. And those organizational
structures can also be written in code. Bitcoin, for example, is an
organizational structure that creates an intermediary between people,
it sets up rules between people. It may end up as a quite
totalitarian system one day, who knows, but at the moment it provides
some kind of balancing.

So
code and human structures do things. WikiLeaks was able to rescue
Edward Snowden because we are an organized institution with
collective experience.

Sarah
Harrison:
Okay, I think there's one question left that's coming from the
internet.

Question:
On IRC there was the question, what was the most difficult part on
getting Snowden out of the US?

Jacob
Appelbaum:
That's quite a loaded question.

Julian
Assange:
Yeah, that's interesting to think whether we can actually answer that
question at all. I'll give a variant of the answer because of the
legal situation it is a little bit difficult.

As
some of you may know, the UK Government has admitted to spending £6
million a year approximately surveilling this embassy in the police
forces alone. So you can imagine the difficulty in communicating with
various people in different countries in relation to his diplomatic
asylum and into logistics in Hong Kong in a situation like that. And
the only reason we were able to succeed is because of extemely
dilligent...

(Assange
video link goes out again)

Jacob Appelbaum:
Perfectly timed.

Sarah Harrison:
And we didn't use Skype.

Jacob Appelbaum:
Do we have time for one more
question? That was such a fantastic, perfect way that you didn't
learn the answer to that question.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

On May 13, 2013,
London's Frontline Club held a panel entitled "The
Case of the U.S. vs Bradley Manning". On the panel was Chase
Madar, author of "The Passion of Bradley Manning", former
Guardian investigations executive editor David Leigh, and campaigner
Naomi Colvin. The discussion was moderated by Richard Gizbert of Al
Jazeera's Listening Post.

David Leigh is
well-known to those familiar with WikiLeaks, mainly due to his publication
of the Cablegate password in his and Luke Harding's book, "WikiLeaks:
Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy". This led to the release
of all 251,287 unredacted State Department cables in September 2011.

Throughout the
hour-and-a-half long discussion, David Leigh put a great deal of effort into
downplaying the significance of the what WikiLeaks has released,
thereby downplaying Bradley Manning's sacrifice. His comments show
a broad range of insensitivity, misunderstandings, and grand understatements. For someone whose career has relied heavily on WikiLeaks in the past few years, and for someone who was invited onto a panel due to his prior experience with WikiLeaks, his attitude is contemptible.

All emphasis in quoted
statements is my own.

WikiLeaks:
"not that sensational"

Despite The Guardian
having published over
240 articles using WikiLeaks cables and having pages dedicated to
both the Iraq
and Afghanistan
War Logs, David Leigh stressed the idea that WikiLeaks' releases
were fairly insignificant.

(00:21:39) LEIGH: Another thought about the coverage that occurs to me is, and
it's kind of a paradoxical one: the truth is, the uncomfortable truth
is, that a lot of stuff that Bradley Manning leaked, in fact all
of the stuff that he leaked, was at the end of the day not that
sensational, and that's why it wasn't classified so high. It was
actually classified really low, when you consider the habit of
overclassification. This stuff was relatively trivial.

…

(00:23:00)
LEIGH: The State Department cables, although politically deeply embarrassing
and probably caused a great deal of rage in the State Department,
were not such a big deal. They didn't actually show anything
really bad about the United States Government. What they showed
was a fairly accurate graphic reporting by United States Government
employees of the crimes of other Governments.

Leigh emphasizes his opinion that not some, but all of what Manning is accused of leaking is "not that sensational". In
court, Bradley Manning admitted
to the following leaks:

At one point, Richard
Gizbert asks David
Leigh if Bradley Manning helped end the Iraq War, to which Leigh
emphatically responds, "No". But, as Madar, Colvin, and
Gizbert all say, there is quite a strong argument to the contrary.
CNN reports:

These talks [between Iraq and the U.S.], however,
broke down over the prickly issue of legal immunity for U.S.
troops in Iraq, a senior U.S. military official with direct
knowledge of the discussions told CNN this month.

...

The negotiations were strained following
WikiLeaks’ release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi
civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American
troops rather than in
an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported.

The
cable details
an event in which U.S.
troops executed at least 10 civilians, including an infant and an
elderly woman, then proceeded to call in an airstrike to destroy the
evidence of the atrocity. CNN
makes a clear connection between this cable and Iraq's unease at
granting immunity to U.S. troops who commit such acts.

Yet
to David Leigh, none of this shows "anything really bad about
the United States Government". He
admits that the cables did reveal crimes by other Governments, but of
course these revelations are downplayed by his sweeping statement
that the leaks as a whole were "not that sensational".

Furthermore,
he comments:

(00:22:47)
LEIGH: The
rest of the stuff that was revealed
about the Afghan fighting and the Iraq fighting show that the
American troops were confused, brutal, ineffective, and killing
civilians, but we knew that.

While
David Leigh again dismisses the significance of WikiLeaks documents,
Richard
Gizbert tells
an
anecdote
of a conversation he had with a T-shirt
salesman:

(00:25:10)
GIZBERT: I was surprised at how many people were affected, actually, by those
WikiLeaks cables.

...

This
guy said to me, you know that 8,000 of
those WikiLeaks cables came out of Islamabad. They didn't tell us
anything we didn't know, but it
confirmed everything that we knew, that our Government was denying,
that Washington was denying.

To
only look to WikiLeaks for brand new revelations dismisses a huge
part of its value. By publishing official documents, WikiLeaks
provides concrete evidence for people's suspicions, which may never
be confirmed otherwise.

Collateral Mistake

David
Leigh also spoke
in detail about the Collateral Murder video released by WikiLeaks.

(00:22:12)
LEIGH: Even the notorious Apache
video of the helicopter gun crew gunning down Reuters' employees in
error in Baghdad, horrific as it was, wasn't ultimately a scandal on
the level of Abu Grahib, say, because it was plain that the
soldiers had made a mistake, they had not
intentionally murdered these civilians.

Screenshot from Collateral Murder

Even military officials do not call the actions depicted in Collateral Murder a mistake; they say the attacks were justified. Throughout the video, the soldiers in the helicopter are constantly requesting for "permission to engage". A van, which was carrying a man and two children, is fired upon as it attempts to help one of the men shot by the helicopter.

Calling
the brutal and intentional killing of civilians a "mistake"
is frankly disgusting and severely
disrespectful to the victims, their families, and
all those who are affected by such violence each and every day.

David
Leigh continues:

LEIGH: And
Reuters, it turned out, had already been shown a big chunk of the
video, anyway, and chosen to keep quiet about it.

Some
Reuters employees were shown the video in an off-the-record
briefing. To say that
they chose to keep quiet is entirely misleading. Reuters attempted to gain
a copy of the video through a FOIA request, but instead received
documents stating the presence of weapons at the scene. After the
release of Collateral Murder, Reuters "pressed the U.S. military
to conduct a full and objective investigation into the killing of the
two staff".Contrary to David Leigh's comment, Reuters showed a strong interest in discovering the truth behind the murders of their journalists.

"I'd
like to think...."

Those who have been following the WikiLeaks saga for awhile, may be familiar with David Leigh's infamous 2011 tweet, which became a short-lived meme:

I like to think that if someone like #bradleymanning had first dealt with me at the #guardian, he wouldn't now be in jail

It seems David
Leigh has not dropped his habit of imagining alternatives, as he spends a large portion of the discussion attempting
to explain how Bradley Manning would be far better off had he leaked
to The Guardian instead of WikiLeaks.

He initially dismisses the importance of the question, as he believes that the circumstance of Bradley Manning as a
whistleblower was "over and done with" once the chatlogs
between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning were released. (He also describes
Adrian Lamo as a "fellow hacker" of Bradley Manning's, implying that Manning was a hacker as well).

(00:06:09)
LEIGH: So the whole issue about whistleblowing and how you handle a source
and how you look after them was already over and done with. Had it
not been over and done with, I would have said the whole saga's
raised some very serious questions about how you do look after
sources, because the whole WikiLeaks notion that you could automate
the process of leaking, that you could devise a mechanical system
under which things could be uploaded and nobody would know who was
involved and that you would never even know your source... that this
sort of automated approach just doesn't work, because sources are
human beings. And Bradley Manning was very much a human being in
a very difficult human situation who cracked, talked, confessed to
somebody he shouldn’t have done, who he didn't know. If... I don't
know, if he'd been our source, I would've liked to think that we
would've developed a relationship in which he could have been cared
for a bit more and not proceeded to blow himself up. So that, you
know, that's my main reaction as a journalist to the whistleblower
situation. That you can't handle whistleblowers in a mechanical
system or terrible things happen to them like this.

David
Leigh blames
two people for Bradley Manning's arrest: WikiLeaks and Bradley
Manning himself. He blames
WikiLeaks for not treating
its sources as "human
beings",
and Bradley Manning for confessing the leaks to Adrian Lamo.

Leigh
continues:

(00:35:50)
LEIGH: If Bradley Manning had dealt
with any professional journalist, I imagine they would have said to
him, 'Now
shut up, don't say a word of this to any other person'. It seems an obvious thing to say, and obviously he
wasn't instructed in that way.
And so he goes and talks to someone he doesn't know online and gets
himself betrayed.

Leigh
is managing to blame both WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning for the same
act. WikiLeaks for not telling him to keep quiet, and Bradley Manning
for telling Adrian Lamo. Of course, while David Leigh claims
it is "obvious"
Bradley Manning wasn't instructed to keep secret, that is not
something we know. The interaction between Bradley Manning and
WikiLeaks, besides what was stated by Manning in his testimony, is
largely unknown.

It
is distressing that Leigh
makes no attempt to define Lamo's role in the incident, as he is the
person who turned Bradley Manning in, after explicitly telling
him the conversation was protected and it was not for
publication.

David
Leigh continues to bash WikiLeaks' anonymous drop-box system multiple
times throughout the panel.

(00:37:05)
LEIGH: When this all happened, The Guardian, along with lots of other
mainstream media, got very interested in the idea of setting up
WikiLeaks-style anonymous dropboxes and so on. And then we all lost
interest and thought, this isn't really what it's about. Y'know,
these automated systems aren't what it's about; it's about human
beings. And
y'know, we all do it the same way we did before. If you contact
somebody at The Guardian, I'd like to think that they deal with you
in a secure and sensitive way as a person.

David Leigh implies that there was no interaction between Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks, which, if you have read or listened to Manning's testimony, is entirely false.

Naomi Colvin responds:

(00:34:32)
COLVIN: What Bradley describes is... he talks about trying to go to New
York Times first, and actually New York Times responded to this... sort of, quite dismissive of it.

…

After
going to The New York Times, trying to contact The Washington Post,
what Bradley Manning describes with dealing with WikiLeaks is pretty
much a conventional
source-journalist
relationship.

…

So
I think that trying to draw the hard line between this is how
WikiLeaks deals with sources and this is how other media outlets deal
with sources, probably isn't all that justified, if you go by what
Bradley says.

Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the [WikiLeaks organization], we never
exchanged identifying information. However, I believe the individual was
likely Mr. Julian Assange [he pronounced it with three syllables], Mr.
Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt.
As the communications transferred from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave 'office' and later 'pressassociation' the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009.
After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly
relationship with Nathaniel. Our mutual interest in information
technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in
conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked
forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.

According to Bradley Manning himself, there actually seemed to be a great deal of conversation between him and a member of WikiLeaks, which completely contradicts David Leigh's representation of WikiLeaks' submission system as something entirely mechanical, with no respect for the sources.

Furthermore, Leigh never touches on how
anonymous drop-boxes are helpful to sources, i.e. that even WikiLeaks
is not able to reveal its
sources, as they never know
who they are. Leigh
instead suggests that a less technical approach would be better,
referencing Cold War tactics of hiding letters in holed out trees and
how the Offshore Leaks were transferred using a harddrive sent via
FedEx. (00:40:50) Yet
Leigh fails to realize that, had Bradley Manning sent physical items
as opposed to digital uploads, Adrian Lamo still would have turned
him in, the records of his access would still be on the computers,
and the likelihood of his arrest would still have been very high.

(00:33:33)
MADAR: I don't think it's entirely fair to beat on Wikileaks for failing to
protect Bradley Manning as a source. Certainly, the New York Times
has a terrible record of this. They left Daniel Ellsberg flapping in
the breeze 40 years ago, and Ellsberg is still very upset about it.

There
is no evidence backing up David Leigh's claim that Bradley Manning
would have been better off had he leaked to The Guardian or any other
media outlet. In fact, knowing that Bradley Manning attempted to contact mainstream media outlets before WikiLeaks, and knowing past records of poor source protection, Manning quite possibly would have been worse off had he gone to The Guardian.

But David Leigh goes even further, questioning whether Bradley Manning should have even
leaked in the first place.

"I
sometimes wake up in the night"

(00:23:30)
LEIGH: "I hate to say this as a journalist, but in a way, I sometimes
wake up in the night and wonder whether it was worth it for
Bradley Manning, what he did."

Having stated his
belief that all of WikiLeaks' recent releases have been mediocre,
David Leigh questions whether it was worth it for Manning to have
leaked at all, which put him through long, sometimes torturous
confinement, and the possibility of life imprison. While it may seem like Leigh's trying to be sympathetic toward Manning, in reality he is completely
undermining Bradley Manning, his morals, and his justification for the
leaks.

(00:29:16)
COLVIN: I just wanted to come back on what David said, about y'know,
was it worth it, would Bradley Manning have thought it was worth it.
In that conversation with Adrian Lamo that led to Bradley Manning
being arrested, he was asked what he wanted to see
from what he did. And he said, 'worldwide discussions, debates,
and reforms'.

She proceeds to detail
the worldwide political action throughout 2011.

COLVIN: All that, that
spark of enthusiasm started in the middle east. And the State
Department cables are at least a contributing factor to that. I
hope that Bradley Manning is sitting wherever he is,
in Fort Leavenworth or in Washington, wherever it is, I hope he's
very pleased with himself and I hope he's satisfied with what
he's done because I think he has every right to be.

David Leigh asking
whether it was "worth it" for Bradley Manning shows
complete disrespect for Manning's decision to blow the whistle. Because Leigh is dismissive of
WikiLeaks' impact, he fails to recognize the importance of Bradley
Manning's sacrifice. But as Colvin says, Manning leaked these
documents because he wanted to affect the world and inform the
public. He was well aware of the risk he was taking, but sacrificed
his freedom in order to expose wrongdoings within the U.S. and other
governments.

Toward the end of the
panel, WikiLeaks staffer Joseph Farrell, present in the audience,
asks David Leigh the following:

(1:20:42)
FARRELL: The Guardian, during the three major leaks of the Afghan, Iraq, and
Cablegate, increased their print run and their sales and clearly
benefited a lot from these leaks. And I was wondering, has The
Guardian helped towards Manning's defense? Do you know?

David Leigh
responds:

LEIGH: Well, I made a
donation. That's all I can tell you.

He then refuses to
answer a question from Richard Gizbert asking how much.

David Leigh benefited
greatly from the WikiLeaks saga. He authored a book on his
experiences and The Guardian gained increased sales due to interest
in WikiLeaks' coverage.

So, while David Leigh
may toss and turn over the possibility that Bradley Manning could have
chosen to stay quiet, it seems
there is little that he and The Guardian have actually done to
support him.

Of course, Leigh
couldn't end a WikiLeaks panel without taking a few jabs at Julian
Assange.

"The
Ecuadorian regime"

During the Q&A
session, David Leigh is discussing Julian Assange's situation at the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

(1:10:15)
LEIGH: He could stay there indefinitely as far as I can see, or until
the Ecuadorian regime is replaced by a different el presidente.

Richard Gizbert
immediately questions him about using "regime":

GIZBERT: "Regime? You see
it as a regime, or..."

LEIGH: "Well, you know,
I mean the administration."

Regime carries the
connotation of a
non-democratic, authoritarian government. To use it in reference to
Ecuador, a democratic republic with an elected president, is
extremely misleading. Although, it is of little surprise coming
from David Leigh, as The Guardian is one of the papers who decided to
publish multiple articlesattackingEcuador
shortly after Julian Assange took refuge in the Embassy. David
Leigh's description of it as a "regime" does not fall short
from The Guardian tree.

"I'm
a professional journalist"

Another audience member asks a detailed question about David Leigh's appearance in
Channel 4's documentary "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies":

(1:14:30) AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you not think that by trashing and by character
assassination of Julian Assange in the Channel 4 documentary you
have assisted Julian and Bradley
Manning's detractors and even detracted from the
broader principle that we're all looking for out of this,
which is of freedom of information?

David Leigh. (screenshot via Youtube)

After listening to the
question, David Leigh asks, "Me?", as if in surprise,
despite the question being directly addressed to him.

LEIGH: What, because
I gave an interview on a Channel 4 documentary about Assange.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Uh, you gave
more than an interview in a Channel 4 documentary. Looked to anybody
who was watching the film as if you had appeared with the sole
intention of assassinating the character of Julian Assange.

LEIGH: Well, if you
think that then there's no discussion to be had, because that's
just dumb. I'm a professional journalist, I'm not an
assassinator.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The way you
describe Julian Assange, now I can't quote from the documentary, but
there was a constant preoccupation with his personality, which you
found displeasing or inadequate or in some way, you know, there's
something wrong with it. So, the impression you're left in that
documentary was that Julian Assange is barmy, and that therefore the
unfortunate outcome of that documentary was that public were
persuaded that what he was trying to do was lacking in any value.

LEIGH: Well, I guess
people can come to their own conclusions. People who have watched
that documentary would have come to very different conclusions to
you. And if you think I'm a person that spends my time
assassinating Julian Assange, you don't understand the
practice of professional journalism.

The documentary
discussed came under a huge amount of controversy due to its biased
take. Not only was David Leigh interviewed in the film, as he claims,
but he was also "the programme's fact-checker and was paid
'consultancy fees' for this role", as reported
by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks filed an Ofcom complaint over the
inaccuracies of the film, however the complaint was ultimately
dismissed. I previously wrote on "Secrets and Lies" in
2012, noting comments from Der Spiegel's
Holger Stark about omitted
facts. For David Leigh to berate the audience member as "dumb" for bringing this up is far from "professional".

And one last point, David Leigh seems to believe that "mainstream media" is some crazy term coined by Julian Assange:

(01:17:12) LEIGH: We're the mainstream media, as he calls it. And from the get-go, Julian disliked us, the mainstream media, the MSM, as he calls us.

Mainstream media (MSM) are those media
disseminated via the largest distribution channels, which therefore
represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter.
The term also denotes those media generally reflective of the prevailing
currents of thought, influence, or activity.

It's not "the mainstream media, as Julian Assange calls it" it's the mainstream media, as everyone calls it. As The Guardian is the third most circulated newspaper in the UK, there's little to argue against it being part of the MSM.

David Leigh's attitude
throughout this entire event was hugely disrespectful, not only to
WikiLeaks, but to Bradley Manning, to victims of the Iraq War and
their families, and to all those who have discovered important truths
hidden within WikiLeaks documents. For someone who has benefited so
greatly from WikiLeaks, Leigh shows absolutely no gratitude. His attempted
sympathy for Bradley Manning falls flat, as it shows no
understanding of Manning and his stated motives.

To have David Leigh
describe himself as a "professional journalist" after this
disgraceful display of ignorance and disrespect is truly laughable.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

After Julian Assange
gave a speech at the Oxford Union on January 23, 2012, The
Guardianpublished
an article criticizing his appearance, saying "he refused to
be gracious". At the time, video had not been uploaded of the
event, so it was impossible to contradict The Guardian's
claims. Now that the
Oxford Union has uploaded the full speech and Q&A session (albeit
only after editing
out footage of "Collateral Murder" due to copyright
fears), The
Guardian's blatant smear tactics
can be revealed.

It
should first be noted that The Guardian
chooses to focus on Julian Assange, rather
than the event which he was speaking
at: the Sam Adams Award ceremony. Thomas Fingar, the
recipient of the award who authored a 2007
National Intelligence Estimate which asserted that Tehran halted
its nuclear weapons program in 2003, is not even mentioned in The
Guardian's article.

The Guardian
describes Mr Assange's talk as "an impassioned defence of
WikiLeaks and against censorship of all kinds", but
foregoes
any actual discussion
of his 21-minute
speech, instead focusing
on the Q&A session. The article states that Mr Assange
"repeatedly refused to answer questions about his decision not
to return to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault".
This is false as Mr
Assange did not "refuse" to answer any questions, but
indeed answered all that were
asked of him.

The
first question The Guardian mentions
is a student asking how long Mr
Assange will stay in the Embassy. He responds, "We
will see. Hopefully not much longer, but who knows". As Mr
Assange and the Ecuadorian Government are
attempting to arrange
a diplomatic solution with Britain, this can be viewed as an
honest, straightforward answer. But The Guardian
implies that his answer was insufficient, stating that
"the next student fared
no better".

The
following question is about Julian Assange's refusal
to return to Sweden. The Guardian describes
his answer stating:

"Assange's
smile faded. "I have answered these questions extensively in the
past," he replied sharply and referred the student to a
website."

First
off, The Guardian
implies that the question altered Julian Assange's mood, something
which can be concluded to be
false upon seeing the video.
He receives and answers the question in the same manner. Secondly, it
is true that he has "answered
these questions extensively", and
it is also detailed in Ecuador's
statement on the acceptance of his asylum.
Furthermore,
after referring the student to the Justice
for Assange website,
he goes on to give a brief explanation of how Sweden refuses to
guarantee against his extradition to the U.S. Again, answering the
question.

Mr
Assange is then asked, "What
would you say to the protesters outside who say that your
appearance here and you being in the Ecuadorian Embassy is dismissing
victims of rape and the seriousness of the crime of rape?"

The Guardian states,
"Assange half closed his eyes and sighed", neither of which
happen. Again, we see The Guardian
attempting to paint Mr Assange as someone who is annoyed by these
questions, when he is actually answering them in an even,
straightforward manner.

The Guardian
continues:

"[Assange
speaking:] "I heard
there was a protest but we sent our cameras out there before joining
you tonight and there were 28 supporters of me and of no one else."

Before the event, however, there had been at
least 50 protesters and no supporters of Assange to be seen. After
the ceremony, security staff confirmed they had not seen anyone
defending the WikiLeaks founder all evening."

If you listen to Mr
Assange's actual response, you will notice that he is implicitly
referring to the planned protest outside the Ecuadorian Embassy:

"Well, I'm
here at the Embassy. I heard there was going to be a protest,
repeated ad infinitum in The Guardian by PPE students who somehow
have roles writing for The Guardian. But actually, we count 28
supporters of ours out there—we just sent out the cameraman—and
no one else."

As he suggests, there
were plans
to protest both outside the Oxford Union and the Ecuadorian
Embassy, arranged by the same person.

It is clear from The
Guardian's article that they
have an obsession with Julian Assange and are incredibly selective
of their quotations in order to frame him as an ungrateful liar. But if one reviews the actual source material, it is evident that The Guardian's claims hold no truth.

All
videos of Julian Assange's speech at the Oxford Union can be seen at
its YouTube
Channel.

If the Guardian could "find no allies" of Julian Assange (Report,
24 January), it did not look very hard. They could be found among the
appreciative audience at the Oxford Union, and in our group seated at
the front: the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. Many
in our group, which co-sponsored the event, had travelled considerable
distances to confer the 10th annual Sam Adams award on Dr Thomas Fingar
for his work overseeing the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that
revealed the absence of an Iranian nuclear weaponisation programme since
2003. Many of us spoke about the need for integrity in intelligence,
describing the ethical dilemma that confronts government employees who
witness illegal activity, including serious threats to public safety.
However, none of this, nor any aspect of Dr Fingar's acceptance speech,
made it into your article.